Future Readers Rap Out the Words by Heart
Liliana Calderon, 7, wiggled out of her seat and ran to join the 30 other second-graders who had gathered in the center of the classroom. With rap music throbbing behind her, Liliana began to chant today’s reading lesson, barely missing a beat as her small voice gained confidence.
Nearby in the fifth-grade room, 10-year-old Myla Ramirez, without any musical accompaniment, stood at her desk, clapped her hands and began chanting along with her classmates.
With or without the music, both Liliana and Myla are using the same rhythmic chanting technique to help improve their reading skills.
The unusual method, now in use in nine of the 43 schools in the Garden Grove Unified School District, is designed to help non-English-speaking children. The technique involves breaking down a story or a concept into key sentences. Children then learn these sentences by chanting them over and over until each child has completely absorbed the meaning and memorized the words.
As aids in that process, some children draw pictures based upon the sentences and act out the sentences in classroom vignettes.
The technique is called the Gonzalez Method and is named for George Gonzalez, a professor at the University of Texas who developed the concept.
“The philosophy behind it is that we don’t want to provide instruction below grade level,” says Sherry Couron, principal at Russell School, where the program is in its third year. “Although it is a method to teach ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) children, even our English-speaking children are benefiting from it.”
According to Dee Morrison, a program facilitator for the district, educators pull out 10 key sentences from the material the children are studying, The sentences capture the essence of the lesson, allowing pupils to keep up with class material by making them absorb important concepts.
“For children with special needs, including our limited-English-speaking population, the anxiety factor is lowered so much when you are learning to speak a new language. It’s intimidating when you open a 10- or 12-page book, but if you can sum (the book) up in 10 sentences, and if you can do the thinking and participate along with everyone else, it helps.”
Helping non-English-speaking pupils keep up academically is especially important at Russell School because 87% of the 670 children speak Spanish as their primary language.
The 30-year-old school, which is actually in the Santa Nita barrio in Santa Ana, is part of the Garden Grove Unified School District and until this year was the largest elementary school in the district.
Teri Rocco, who teaches second grade at Russell School, uses the chanting technique in both the Spanish and English portions of her class.
“It really works,” she says. “We take a 12- or 13-page story and extract the meat and potatoes of it. Then, instead of getting lost in all these words, the children can learn and keep up. A lot of it is memorization, but as the year progresses memorization becomes recognition.”
The chanting also helps ESL students become familiar with English cadence and pronunciation, according to principal Couron. “We feel they pick up the rhythm of the language this way.”
At Russell School, the technique is used mostly in reading and literature, but in other district schools it has been used to teach additional subjects, including science and social studies, according to Annelle Arthur, director of K-6 instructional services.
“The chanting really helps,” says Arthur, who was instrumental in bringing the technique to the district. “It’s very effective. All stories lend themselves to it. For example, we have used this method in science to teach kids the most important concepts.”
Teacher Earnestine Harvey, who uses the technique in her fifth grade class at Russell School, says the key-sentence method helps improve comprehension and vocabulary. During a recent literature segment, Harvey’s pupils read an Irish folk tale called “Oona and Cuchulain,” a story about three giants.
“We read it aloud in class, listened to it on tape and today we chanted our 10 sentences,” she says.
But Harvey didn’t stop there. She then took the 10-sentence summary, assigned parts and had the pupils act out the story in front of the class. In her second grade class, Rocco embellished her lesson by setting the 10-sentences to a rap beat. She also had her second-graders draw pictures depicting each key sentence.
“The kids love it,” Rocco says. “Even the quietest kids participate.”
Because all the children--regardless of educational backgrounds or abilities--are able to participate, the program does wonders for the kids’ self-esteem, according to Harvey. “All the kids work together, and although some perform greater than others, we work as a team. So, the children’s self-esteem is raised through this method.”
Greater self-esteem leads to greater academic success, Morrison says. “This method makes them feel successful. It gives children a sense that they are doing exactly what the rest of their class is doing. And when they feel successful, they are successful. Success breeds success. They keep trying harder, and they really do feel a sense of accomplishment.”
Because the program is new, the school district has no official test results to indicate the effectiveness of the teaching technique, Morrison says.
“But from an observation level, in human terms, we’ve seen it work,” she says. “One example I remember was from when Dr. Gonzalez was here in the first year of the program. There was a child in one of the classrooms who was a beginning ESL student. He had never spoken aloud in the classroom before but had been sitting in the class listening to the 10 important sentences and absorbing things that had been going on.
“When the teacher asked for a volunteer, this child volunteered and went to the front and did the sentence. The teacher was absolutely amazed. Not only did the student speak in English, but he did it in front of a crowd.”
